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Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Oh dear. As my oldest son said, doesn't he realize this will just keep all that stuff alive that he'd rather people forget???

In the interests of keeping myself out of Craig's cross-hairs (he's suing Cameron Slater and John Stringer for more than Jordan Williams, because the first two are BLOGGERS!) - all I'll say here is that all of this will (is backfiring) backfire on Craig.

Any respect from this side of the political divide that might have been given him because of what he was trying to do with the Conservative Party is now totally gone.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

This election will be remembered as the one that rescued the career of David Cameron, the British prime minister, who was publicly contemplating his own exit from politics only two months ago. It will also be remembered as the election that abruptly ended the career of the Labor Party leader, Ed Miliband, who had confidently carved his electoral promises onto a large piece of limestone only last week. Above all, it will be remembered as the election that every single major pollster got wrong...

Certainly it could literally mark the beginning of the end of the United Kingdom, that union of four nations — Welsh, English, Northern Irish and Scottish — whose stability hasn’t seriously been challenged for quite some time...

...Suddenly, a vision of a different future has opened up, especially for a certain kind of English Tory: Without dour, difficult, left-wing Scotland, maybe they could rule the rest of what used to be Great Britain, indefinitely. For U.S. readers who find the significance of this hard to understand: Imagine that a Texan secessionist party had, after years of campaigning, just taken every Texan seat in Congress. And now imagine that quite a few people in the rest of the country — perhaps in the Democratic Party — had, after years of arguing back, finally begun to think that Texan secession really might not be so bad and were beginning to calculate the electoral advantages accordingly.

I suppose a similar thing for New Zealand would be the South Islanders getting so sick of being part of New Zealand that over the years there would have been a growing movement for separation which everyone in the North gradually accepts as not such a bad outcome.

This election may also be the beginning of the end of Great-Britain-as-we-know-it in another sense, too. In 2013, Cameron promised that he would, if reelected, hold a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union. He also promised, somewhat more vaguely, that he would first “renegotiate” that membership. Even today nobody knows what that means, for Cameron has never explained it. Nor has he ever sought European allies or partners to help him in that process, and this isn’t the best moment to begin. The rest of Europe’s leaders are involved in a complex financial negotiation with Greece, are forging a strategy toward Russia, are facing an enormous illegal migration crisis on its southern coasts — and aren’t collectively enthusiastic about launching into a long, painful negotiation with Britain.

Bloody typical really, but not so surprising. Britain was one of the great maritime empires, and that wasn't too long ago for them. Being outside of the main destruction of Europe during WWII, they don't have as strong a desire to work with Europeans for mutual benefit, as to Britain, this mutual benefit is not so obvious.

But whatever the rest of Europe wants, this issue is now of necessity at the center of Britain’s foreign policy. In practice, that means British diplomats aren’t going to have time to worry about Russia or Libya in the next few years, because they’ll be focused on E.U. treaties. At E.U. summits, the British will want to talk about Britain’s role in Europe, not Europe’s role in the world, or Europe’s crises on its southern and eastern borders. The outward-looking, fully engaged Britain that “punched above its weight” has already faded away, and not everybody in London is very sorry about this turn of events either. Cameron has been less interested in foreign policy than any British prime minister in recent memory, his party has just run the most insular election campaign that anybody can recall and he has just been rewarded with a resounding victory for doing so.

[...W]hile much attention has been paid to the growing authoritarianism of the Kremlin and on the support for Putin’s regime on the part of the Russian oligarchs whom Putin has enriched through his crony capitalism, little has been paid to the equally critical role of the Russian Orthodox Church in helping to shape Russia’s current system, and in supporting Putin’s regime and publicly conflating the mission of the Russian state under Vladimir Putin’s leadership with the mission of the Church. Putin’s move in close coordination with the Russian Orthodox Church to sacralize the Russian national identity has been a key factor shaping the increasingly authoritarian bent of the Russian government under Putin, and strengthening his public support, and must be understood in order to understand Russia’s international behavior.

The close relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the Russian state based upon a shared, theologically-informed vision of Russian exceptionalism is not a new phenomenon. During the days of the Czar, the Russian ruler was seen as God’s chosen ruler of a Russian nation tasked with representing a unique set of value embodied by Russian Orthodoxy, and was revered as “the Holy Orthodox Czar”. Today, a not dissimilar vision of Russian exceptionalism is once again shared by the ROC and the Kremlin, and many Russians are beginning to see Vladimir Putin in a similar vein – a perception encouraged both by Putin and by the Church, each of which sees the other as a valuable political ally and sees their respective missions as being interrelated.

John Schindler wrote something similar at the end of 2014: Putin’s Orthodox Jihad, while as Brian Whitmore (of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty from) wrote Vladimir Putin, Conservative Icon a few months earlier. I strongly recommend interested readers go through both of these articles as well, for much of what these authors talk about are patterns that I myself have noticed.

As many readers of this blog know, one of my co-bloggers has very strong Russian Orthodox beliefs and has exhibited on numerous occasions a type of Putin hero worship. Therefore, he and I existing on the same blog after Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year has created a rift between us, so to speak.

Fulton Sheen, many years ago predicted that in the future there would be a co-opting of Christianity to political aims. It seems to be a very constant temptation. The Russian Orthodox Church and Putin are doing this very thing. Rather than the ROC being a balancing religious voice in Russia acting as a moral brake on the excessive authoritarian tendencies of the Kremlin, it instead acts as an enforcer of the politics.

Putin has also tried to make himself look like a conservative, moral and religious man; but it's as if he is playing a part rather than living these aims. The conservatism, morality and religious sentiment is very shallow. All of it was pretty much obvious to me prior to the Ukraine invasion, but I ignored it. I thought the man is trying, I'll let him be and not criticise. After all you have to give people a chance, despite how something looks.

No more chances now, though. With everything that has happened, Putin is looking more and more like another anti-Christ than a reincarnation of St Paul, as is believed by some in Russia.

Friday, May 22, 2015

Since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, citizen defense and paramilitary groups in Poland have seen their numbers swell. The government in Warsaw has officially included these troops in its plans for national defense.

... Poland is the real issue when it comes to defending NATO’s exposed Eastern frontier from Russian aggression. Only Poland, which occupies the Alliance’s central front, has the military power to seriously blunt any Russian moves westward. As in 1920, when the Red Army failed to push past Warsaw, Poland is the wall that will defend Central Europe from any westward movement by Moscow’s military. To their credit, and thanks to a long history of understanding the Russian mentality better than most NATO and EU members, Warsaw last fall, when the violent theft of Crimea was still just a Kremlin dream, announced a revised national security strategy emphasizing territorial defense. Eschewing American-led overseas expeditions like those to Iraq and Afghanistan that occupied Poland’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) during the post-9/11 era, this new doctrine makes defending Poland from Eastern aggression the main job of its military. Presciently, then-Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, contradicting optimistic European and NATO presumptions of our era that conventional war in Europe was unthinkable, stated in May 2013, “I’m afraid conflict in Europe is imaginable.”

Particularly in light of the fact that both NATO and the Obama administration rejected my advice to seriously bolster Alliance defenses in the East with four heavy brigades, including the two brigades that Warsaw explicitly asked NATO — meaning, in practice, the United States — for after this year’s Russo-Ukrainian War began in earnest, the issue of Poland’s military readiness is of considerable importance to countries far beyond Poland. Instead of creating a militarily viable NATO tripwire that would deter Russian aggression, the Alliance, and Washington, DC, have opted for symbolic gestures — speeches, military visits, small exercises — that impress the Western media but not the Russians.

Russia’s aggression against neighbouring Ukraine has changed almost everything. Poland is deeply concerned about its national security and about the degree of solidarity its western allies are able – and willing – to demonstrate. This anxiety is not limited to the ruling class, or politicians. It is deeply felt by the population.

... Poland got one thing right: it never believed in “the end of history”, Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 formula proclaiming the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy over ideology. This scepticism led Poland to push extremely hard for admittance to Nato and the EU, both seen as virtual life insurance policies for the nation.

...Poland would much prefer to have two US brigades under Nato command stationed on its territory. This was opposed by Germany on the grounds that it would violate the Nato-Russia agreement of 1997. Polish officials have a point when they say privately that the German position is questionable, because the agreement explicitly rested on the notion that strategic circumstances would remain unchanged in Europe, which is no longer the case. A Polish diplomat put it to me this way: “In 2014, with the Russian annexation of Crimea and the Russian assault in the Donbass, the unthinkable became reality.”

Just in case anyone tries to paint all this as "American propaganda", as my co-blogger Andrei accused me of yesterday on this post, notice my sources here. They are German, British, Polish (in that these stories are about Poland) and yes, American.

When separatist leader Oleg Tsarev announced the end of the scheme to unite the Russian-speaking regions of eastern Ukraine into a single pro-Moscow separatist entity on May 20, it was the latest in a series of signs that the yearlong conflict in the Donbas is lumbering toward some kind of endgame.

In remarks reported by Gazeta.ru, Tsarev, the chairman of the self-styled parliament of Novorossia, said the project was being suspended because it "doesn't fit into" the cease-fire agreement signed in Minsk in February.

In reality, Novorossia was stillborn from the get-go. Unlike in Donetsk and Luhansk, where pro-Moscow separatism took hold, Russian-speakers in Odesa, Mariupol, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Kharkiv, and elsewhere remained loyal to Kyiv.

...

Russia had once hoped to partition Ukraine by seizing so-called Novorossia, which stretches from Kharkiv in the northeast to Odesa in the south, which would have given it a land bridge to annexed Crimea.

But having failed at this, Moscow is now seeking to keep the separatist-held enclaves in Donetsk and Luhansk inside Ukraine in order to use them as a fifth column to paralyze Kyiv and keep the country from integrating with the West.

If and how these territories are reintegrated into Ukraine will be the main battleground in the coming phase of the conflict.

As an aside, it's good to see the daily video integrated into the daily post - the link up is important for those that prefer not to listen and just want to read or vice-versa. Makes it easier for me linking to both also as it's one less link to refer to.

A pro-Kremlin institute unveils a computer program that will trawl social networks in search of chatter about unauthorized protests -- and report it to the authorities.

The latest petty harassment of a socially conscious artist. Yet another cartoonish exaltation of the national leader. And the creation of a couple more blunt instruments to repress dissent.

Just another month in the brave new Russia.

I can't imagine any company in the Western world unveiling a computer program to trawl social networks to check for chatter about unauthorised protests. In fact, protests in the Western world are a part of life - there's no need for authorisation. Even if they are rent-a-mob leftists, we put up with them.

Russia’s communications watchdog has threatened to fine Facebook, Google and Twitter and block their services under a controversial law on blogging.

In a letter to executives on on Monday, the director of the communications oversight agency warned that the three US companies could face sanctions if they continued alleged illegal activities in Russia, Izvestia newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Any action could affect a number of social media sites: besides its eponymous social network, Facebook also owns the photo-sharing service Instagram, while Google owns YouTube, BlogSpot and Google+. Facebook and Twitter, in particular, have been instrumental to organisers of opposition protests in Russia, where the major television news channels are controlled by the state.

A spokesman told the state news agency RIA Novosti that the watchdog’s complaints related mainly to deleting pages with extremist materials and receiving information under what is known as the “bloggers law”. This 2014 legislation requires popular bloggers to register their real identities with the authorities, a measure that prominent bloggers say is designed to have a curb free speech and criticism of the regime.

The agency’s deputy director, Maksim Ksenzov, had issued a warning to the three companies on 6 May, telling them they were in violation of the bloggers law because they had not provided requested data on the number of daily visitors to several users’ pages, as well as information allowing the authorities to identify the owners of accounts with more than 3,000 daily visitors.

According to the law, the agency can fine a violating organisation up to 300,000 roubles (£3,850); a second infringement can incur a fine of up to 500,000 roubles or a suspension of its operations for up to 30 days.

If the companies did not take steps to delete from their sites “information containing calls to participate in mass rioting, extremist activities” or unsanctioned public events, the watchdog would “limit access to the information resource where that information is posted”, Ksenzov warned.

Wow, it's totally amazing that Russia uses the internet outside of Russia to spread disinformation, while as within Russia it's on the warpath in a massive clampdown. Well, Ok, not so amazing, just the irony is blinding.

I suppose many readers might assume that I would be for the continuing teaching of bible classes in state schools. Of the type where the school "closes down" for a little while so that the class can be taught out of school time. Except I don't support this sort of thing at all.

The whole notion of closing a school down so a subject can be taught is ridiculous. Either the school has the mandate to teach something or it doesn't. In other words, Bible class should be made part of the curriculum, and then the fight is with the Government, or the school not teach it at all. Any parents that want Bible class need to get together and create some sort of Sunday school.

So, in that way I am on the side of Jeff McClintock, who is taking his 7 year old daughter's school and Attorney General, Chris Finlayson to court. From 3 News:

A parent fighting bible lessons in schools admits he's feeling a weight on his shoulders as his High Court battles begins.

Jeff McClintock is taking a case against Red Beach School north of Auckland, and the Attorney-General, Chris Finlayson.

He says it has become a David and Goliath battle that could set a precedent for other schools.

What I find interesting, is this Bible in secular schools is really a hang over from when every one in New Zealand was Catholic or Protestant. The Catholics had their own religious schools and the Protestants had the state schools.

From the 3 News article, Massey University History Professor Peter Lineham says:

"We've had this system of bible in schools for 100 years or more now and it came about because there was consensus at the time that those who hadn't gone off to Catholic schools were very happy to have some kind of religious education, but there was always a right for people to opt out. Now the opters-out are claiming that this is a terrible prejudice against them."

I'll ignore Peter Lineham's ideas that he puts forward in the article, because I disagree with them.

Another option, could be that the Bible classes need to be at the beginning or the end of school, so that parents who don't want their children to attend just take them when school officially starts or pick them up early. This is how the Catholic school my youngest son went to a number of years back dealt with objectors, such as myself, to schools teaching sex education to pre-teenage children.

I personally find that with religious education, it's pretty much pointless if the person teaching it does not live it or believe it. In fact, it's a good way of creating little atheists if it's not taught well. I've seen enough of that sort of thing in Catholic schools where the religious education can be trivialised or dumbed down.

Also, from the Catholic point of view, a parent's right to have their child taught what they believe, even if it is atheism, is paramount. God gives atheists children and expects those atheists to raise those children in the best way they can. So even if I disagree with atheism, I side with the father in his case against the school, for no one has a right to teach children anything that is contrary to their parent's beliefs.

Compulsory schooling, for too long in countries such as NZ, creates a belief that the will of the state is supreme with regards to education. It's good that this idea is being challenged.

On May 5, the Ukrainian government released new data which says that they have lost 28 towns to Russian-backed separatists since February 18. That was the day the strategic town of Debaltsevo, which guarded a key highway to separatist-controlled regions, slipped from Ukraine’s control. The map of separatist territory is as alarming as it is illustrative, especially when it is combined with the daily reports of ceasefire violations and fighting coming out of both the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and Kiev.

On May 6, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko addressed the National Security and Defense Council and warned that Russia has 50,000 troops on the border and its proxies have more than 40,000 fighters inside the country. That’s not only a combined 50% increase in possible invaders over July of last year, the month which proceeded the “Russian invasion” on the Ukrainian mainland. It’s more than enough soldiers to invade and gobble up a significant amount of Ukrainian territory.

“There is a convincing evidence that Ukraine strictly complies with the Minsk [ceasefire] agreements and militants constantly violate them,” Poroshenko noted. Separatists do not allow international observers to verify their withdrawal of heavy weaponry. “Militants regularly shoot Ukrainian positions, engage in reconnaissance and subversive activity and provoke armed confrontations in order to disrupt peaceful settlement of the conflict.”

One day later, May 7, the OSCE witnessed a significant amount of fighting both near Donetsk and around a town called Shirokino, 20 kilometers east of Mariupol—part of a trend of heavier fighting which started in late April. The OSCE also reported that one of their surveillance drones was jammed for 10 minutes while attempting to monitor the movement of separatist tanks near Donetsk, in violation of the 50-kilometer demarcation line agreed upon by both sides.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

For more than year, there's been a war in eastern Ukraine that nobody called a war. And for the past three months, there's been a cease-fire there that wasn't a cease-fire.

And now that the agreement reached in Minsk in February that was supposed to end hostilities in the Donbas is all but dead in the water, we seem to be lurching toward some kind of endgame. And it is shaping up to be as strange and counterintuitive as every other aspect of this through-the-looking-glass hybrid conflict.

Personally, I think, Russia Putin needs to be forced to repair the damage to the country of Ukraine and pay reparations to all those families, both Ukrainian and Russian, that have lost loved ones in this pointless war. Putin is worth at least $40 billion, though some think he's even richer at $200 billion, so he can afford it.

Pope Francis and President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority at the Vatican

There's been a bit of outrage over Pope Francis supposedly calling President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority an "angel of peace", according to some news reports, during a private conversation between the two when Mr Abbas visited the Pope at the Vatican recently. Other media reported the phrase as an exhortation for Abbas to be an angel of peace.

Emmanuel Nahshon, the spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said he heard a recording of the conversation, had consulted with Israel’s ambassador to the Vatican and was satisfied that the pope had said, “May you be an angel of peace.”

“He is far from an angel of peace,” Mr. Nahshon said of Mr. Abbas, adding, “If he was, perhaps by now there would be peace.”

Yep. There's also no harm in encouraging him to be an angel of peace. The Palestinian Authority needs as many of those types as possible.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

An Australian journalist, Michael Usher recently traveled to Ukraine, into rebel-held territory, to look into the evidence for a Russian BUK shooting down MH17 as it flew over Ukraine.

He used information from Bellingcat, photos and geo-locations, which he verified by going to those places. He saw exactly where the Russian BUK passed through, thus putting to bed any suggestion that it was a Ukranian BUK as asserted by Russia. He also talks to an expert as to whether the damage to the plane was from projectile (ie a Ukranian fighter plane as the Russians initially asserted) or a BUK which creates shrapnel type damage.

This 60 Minutes TV programme was screened in Australia only a few days ago and is a must watch, especially for those that are unsure as to what actually happened. It seems the Australians will not let this go, and with good reason.

This is a new wave of internet crowd sourcing of forensic detective work backed up by the MSM.

UPDATE 20/05/15: The second video (part II) has been removed from this post. That video has been taken down due to a copyright claim by Channel 9 in Australia. If the first video disappears, the videos are still available through the link related link above. I really wish media outlets such as the Australian Channel 9 would think about making it easier for bloggers to disseminate their material by providing embed links the way You Tube does.

UPDATE 2: Something I should have added to this post, so here it is. A more in depth explanation of the methods Bellingcat uses to track Russian military activity (including the shooting down of MH-17, and the firing of missiles from Russia into Ukrainian territory). It's half an hour and well worth your time if you are interested in this sort of thing...

UPDATE 3: Damn, embeded video does not work. Here's the link to the page it originated on instead. Why can't everyone just put their stuff on You-Tube where embedding always works? Note, it looks like their servers are down. Oh well, I'll just leave the post like this.

Monday, May 18, 2015

Anyone who wants to understand the current Russian position on Ukraine would do well to begin with George Orwell’s classic, 1984. The connections go deeper than the adjective “Orwellian”: the structure and the wisdom of the book are guides, often frighteningly precise ones, to current events.

The easiest way to begin, in light of the now entirely open Russian invasion of Ukraine, is with “War is Peace,” one of the slogans of the imagined empire in Orwell’s tale. After all, every attempt thus far at negotiation and cease-fire has been accompanied by a Russian escalation, to the point where we can be certain that this is not a coincidence. If Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with other leaders, we must simply expect that this is cover for the latest outrage, as with the entrance of Russian troops, armor and artillery during the recent talks in Minsk.

But we need to dig a bit deeper into the plot for the three concepts needed to understand this very strange war, in which Putin has radicalized Russian politics, destroyed a European peace order, challenged Europeans’ assumptions about their entire future — and even threatened nuclear war. Every reason proffered to explain a war that is pointless to the point of nihilism is obviously bogus or self-contradictory or both. To grasp this horrible event in which people are killing and dying for no discernible reason, we need to remember some key concepts from Orwell: Eurasia, doublethink and learning to love Big Brother.

In Orwell’s 1984, one of the world powers is called Eurasia. Interestingly enough, Eurasia is the name of Russia’s major foreign policy doctrine. In Orwell’s dystopia, Eurasia is a repressive, warmongering state that “comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait.” In Russian foreign policy, Eurasia is a plan for the integration of all the lands from—you guessed it—Portugal to the Bering Strait. Orwell’s Eurasia practices “neo-Bolshevism”; Russia’s leading Eurasian theorist once called himself a “national Bolshevik.” This man, the influential Alexander Dugin, has long advocated that the Ukrainian state be destroyed, and has very recently proposed that Russia exterminate Ukrainians.

If you really don't know what is going on in Russia and Ukraine, read everything you can about the situation by Timothy Snyder. The article above is continued here.